Weight of the World: Themes of Burden in “Scales”

“Scales” by Louise Erdrich has a strong theme of burden that centres on the characters of Dot and Gerry bringing a child into the world, and the responsibility that goes along with that. Elements within the short story that contribute to this theme include a recurring motif of the weight of things, the use of universal symbols such as colour, and a well timed moment of crisis that illustrates the pain of a father bringing a child with an uncertain future into the world.

Weight is used repeatedly in the story to help illustrate the burden that Dot and Gerry are facing, as seen through the narrator’s eyes. This motif takes three forms, the most prominent of which is the setting where both Dot and the narrator work, the weigh stack. The small, cramped environment helps bring a sense of desperation to the plight of Dot and her child. She is described as having held both the job of truck-weigher and truck-weight-inspector until the narrator came along (331). This serves not only as a continuation of the weight motif but also as an illusion to the fact that it is likely that Dot will be doing both jobs at home as well, as both the mother and the father. The narrator’s arrival and assuming of one job to help out makes them a small family unit in their old rundown weighshack, a dynamic we return to at the end of the story when Gerry is imprisoned permanently.

The second way in which weight is brought into the story is with the weight of the characters. At separate points, Dot is described as weighing “over 200 pounds,” (332) Gerry is described as a “two hundred and fifty pound Indian” (333) and baby Jason is described as being too light and weighing nothing at all despite his girth at the end of the story (342). This constant reference to weight, especially with regard to the child, exemplifies how much of a burden he will be on their lives, especially in their precarious situation, with Gerry in and out of prison constantly. In the end, when he doesn’t even weigh enough to register on the scales, it leaves us with some semblance of hope that perhaps Dot and Jason’s life will not be too hard to carry after all. Physical weight is used again by the narrator when she says “It occurred to me that although I measured many tons every day, I would never know how heavy a ton was unless it fell on me” (342). This references the fact that even though she had watched Dot and Gerry’s situation over the course of their pregnancy, she would never understand the burden of it unless she went through it herself.

The third form in which the author brings about the motif of burden is with the scales. As reflected in the title itself, scales play a large role in the story, and not just the physical scales that the women use every day. Gerry believes in justice and believes that the judicial system has failed him. The images of justice, in the American judicial system, are of a blind woman holding scales out in front of her. This completes the motif of weight by having the agents of justice, the police, serve as the unwitting antagonists for the story. Thus the weight bearing down on them comes from all three sides, in their setting, their circumstance, and the system.

Erdrich uses colour to effect mood and atmosphere at various points in the story (pink and blue on 336, aqua on 339), but none more often than the universal symbol of orange. Orange is used three times in reference to Dot or the baby. Once in reference to the “orange dye-job [that] had not suited her colouring” (332), again months later when Dot was knitting a “screaming orange” suit (336), and lastly with the colour of the chairs in the waiting room while Dot was giving birth (339). Orange is closely associated with October, the month that Jason is born, but it is also the colour of the second chakra, which is located near the womb in women. In this sense orange is associated with creation and creating life, even though many also associate it with fall and death. It is the constant presence of this colour that reminds us that the child is on either Dot or Gerry’s mind, more specifically of the double-edged nature of the child as being both a wondrous new creation and a deathly burden to all that they know.

All these things finally get to Gerry while in the waiting room, awaiting news on Dot and the new baby. Like most first time fathers he is nervous and restless, pacing the floor and sweating profusely. But it isn’t until he goes to visit Dot for “perhaps half an hour” (340) and sees his child for the first time that the full weight of his situation finally occurs to him and he has a moment of crisis. In this scene we see Gerry worrying about his future and the future of his new child, about his fugitive status and of what Dot and Jason will do if he is locked up again with no source of income. He decides, for the first time in his life, to finally make a decent effort at outrunning the police because “It was perhaps the very first time in his life he had something to run for” (340). Up until this point, Gerry has been content to make repeat the same pattern over and over again for the entirety of his adult life. He breaks out of jail, spends some time with his wife, then goes back to jail. At the point in which our narrator meets him, he is so used to this pattern that when the police come to collect him he doesn’t even put up a fight, if he ever did. But now the birth of Jason has forced him to change things. Gerry is no longer content to repeat the same cycle, and seems to want a different life for his son. And he gets it, though not in the way he intended, as at the end of the story he is in prison permanently as a result of killing a federal officer.

The choice to bring a child into the world is a weighty one even under the best of circumstances, full of responsibility and repercussions. This burden is even greater in the situation of out lead characters, who have to deal with it in the face of overwhelming odds and adversity Erdrich illustrates this theme with the continued reference to weight and the colour orange, leading up to the final crisis moment with Gerry and its consequences. And though the story ends on a hopeful note, the hardships faced by Dot, Gerry and Jason are far from resolved. No parents’ are.